JOHN SINCLAIR
John Sinclair (born October 2, 1941) is an American poet, writer, and political activist from Flint, Michigan. Sinclair’s defining style is jazz poetry, and he has released most of his works in audio formats. As an emerging young poet in the mid-1960s, Sinclair took on the role of manager for the Detroit rock band MC5. The band’s politically charged music and its Yippie core audience dovetailed with Sinclair’s own radical development. In 1968, while still working with the band, he conspicuously served as a founding member of the White Panther Party, a militantly anti-racist socialist group and counterpart of the Black Panthers. Sinclair eventually left the US and took up residency in Amsterdam. He continues to write and record and, since 2005, has hosted a regular radio program, The John Sinclair Radio Show, as well as produced a line-up of other shows on his own radio station, Radio Free Amsterdam. (More from Wikipedia)
MC5 is a Detroit band and stands for “Motor City 5”. Jason Ankeny opens his article on the band in Allmusic: “Alongside their Detroit-area brethren the Stooges, MC5 essentially laid the foundations for the emergence of punk; deafeningly loud and uncompromisingly intense, the group’s politics were ultimately as crucial as their music, their revolutionary sloganeering and anti-establishment outrage crystallizing the counterculture movement at its most volatile and threatening. Under the guidance of svengali John Sinclair (the infamous founder of the radical White Panther Party), MC5 celebrated the holy trinity of sex, drugs, and rock & roll, their incendiary live sets offering a defiantly bacchanalian counterpoint to the peace-and-love reveries of their hippie contemporaries.”
(December 2016)
